July 24, 2014 11:52 AM CDTJuly 26, 2014 09:05 AM CDTGetting to college was the easy part for Sunset High grad

Getting to college was the easy part for Sunset High grad

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Evans Caglage/Staff Photographer

Jannet Barrera, a former student at Sunset High School, is about to start her third year at Texas A&M on a full scholarship. At first, Barrera felt overwhelmed; moving to the campus of 50,000 was a culture shock. But she’s found important ways to fit in.

Jannet Barrera knew she had to keep going her freshman year. The once high-flying Sunset High School graduate couldn’t stop, even though she really wanted to leave Texas A&M University. The eyes of her family’s next generation were upon her. She couldn’t let them down. “I have to go back,” she told herself.

Indeed, Barrera did go back. She made it back for her second semester in January 2013. One month from now, she will begin her junior year at Aggieland.

Getting to this point has been anything but easy. Her parents, legal Mexican immigrants, had only an elementary school education. Her older sisters stopped their education after high school. She was the first in her family to attend college. And her first semester at a major university of 50,000 students had been a culture shock.

Barrera felt overwhelmed, despite graduating from Dallas’ Sunset High School in 2012 as student body president. She also left Sunset with a full ride to the prestigious university with two A&M scholarships and a Gates Millennium Scholarship, one of the most prestigious awards a high school student can win.She had even decided to join A&M’s famous Corps of Cadets.

It was in her senior year in high school that I became aware of the self-possessed young Oak Cliff woman. Sunset’s principal at the time, Tony Tovar, told me about his promising student — and the obstacles before her.

For one thing, Barrera’s parents did not understand her thirst for college and greater knowledge. They preferred their daughter stay close to home, along with her siblings.

But she was determined to go to college, even though it created so much conflict at home that she didn’t know whether her father would even attend her high school graduation ceremony. (He did attend, though Barrera didn’t realize it until she heard him call out her name as she received her diploma.)

Two summers ago, I wrote a profile of her for Points because her story was so inspirational and compelling. It remains so for this simple reason: A student from an immigrant family is challenging the odds to become part of the larger American society.

Her story also is central to the future of Texas and the United States. The world of tomorrow increasingly will revolve around students like Barrera. Latinos make up more than half of Texas’ K-12 public school enrollment. Nationwide, they represent almost 25 percent.

The degree to which they leave high school with a diploma, ready for a decent job — or, better yet, college — will shape their social and economic mobility. But the level of education they obtain will have an impact far beyond their personal mobility.

Their integration into American society will determine whether our nation will have the medical researchers, teachers, entrepreneurs, craftsmen and even political leaders it will need in the future. To put this issue another way: If schools don’t help assimilate immigrant students, neither Texas nor the nation will be able to sustain a workforce and a decent way of life.

That is why Barrera’s story matters to the broader public, but, as I wrote two years ago, it isn’t an easy one to script.

Barrera arrived in College Station upon the power of her impressive high school accomplishment. That momentum all but disappeared within her first month.

She quickly left the Corps. Her roommate, another first-generation collegian, returned home. Barreraeven requested papers to transfer to the University of Texas at Arlington. She wanted to be closer to home to alleviate the homesickness and separation she was experiencing.

Meanwhile, she developed a coping mechanism of going to class, studying, eating, sleeping. The next day, repeat. The larger world around her simply was too foreign. She couldn’t relate to or talk with many students. She liked the academics, she liked her professors, and she loved the feeling of being at college. In fact, she told me she never doubted her academic skills. But there was this overwhelming feeling of not belonging.

As she was describing her experience, Barrera offered an example. She had done well after one exam, scoring a 98. That wasn’t the case for the student next to her. When that young woman saw her own result, she said, “My dad will pay for this class again next semester.”

Barrera was stunned. She couldn’t even relate to the privilege implied in that comment, or to the affluence she saw elsewhere. “I could handle the academics,” she quietly told me, “but I couldn’t talk to the students.”

The only people she could relate to were her fellow first-generation students, some of whom she met through being one of A&M’s select Regents Scholars and Century Scholars. Through those prestigious programs, the school connected her to students with similar backgrounds.

Still, she had to make it through that first semester. Today, she feels sheepish about saying this, but she missed her family so much. She and her mother had gone everywhere together, she told me.

When she went home that first Christmas, something unexpected happen. Her life changed dramatically, and in a way she could not have imagined.

The transformation started when she saw the gleam in the eyes of her young nieces and nephews. They were looking up to her, though Barrera felt so discouraged. They wanted to know all about A&M. It had become their school. One niece even painted her room maroon and white, the color of the Aggies the young girl was coming to love.

The holidays at home sparked a revelation. “All of them were gung-ho Aggies,” Barrera laughed. Then, seriously, she added: “I saw my niece’s face as I talked to her about little things about A&M. I then thought, ‘What am I doing? I need to be here’” at A&M.

When she headed back to school, it was no longer just for herself. It was for the good of that next generation. “I needed to be a big girl. I kept telling myself: ‘You didn’t do all that hard work at Sunset for nothing.’”

The role of schools in assimilating students

During her second semester, Barrera went through rush, the quintessential college experience for many young Texans. She pledged a multicultural sorority, Kappa Delta Chi. It became a turning point for her, along with the mentoring she was receiving through her scholarship programs. This part of her story is instructive, because it shows how schools can help students like Barrera become part of the larger culture.

Kappa Delta Chi offered Barrera the chance to hang around with other young women who shared her struggles. “They had the same stories,” she explained. As a result, some of the culture shock started to diminish.

What’s more, the outgoing student and her sorority sisters were involved with community service. Barrera commented several times how she missed community service, which she and her peers had been involved in at Sunset High School. Along with her sorority sisters, she started getting up at 5 some mornings to cook tacos and distribute them to immigrant workers waiting at nearby gas stations for day jobs.

Her passion for community also influenced her choice of majors. She started in nursing but now is in community health.

Through her major, Barrera traveled to the Dominican Republic in May, working on public health projects. She now is looking to travel to Europe in December and Taiwan next year as part of her degree plan. “I love informing others about community health,” she said, passion rising in her voice.

Each of these elements — the sorority, the service, the travel — matters immensely. They are the building blocks that allow students to become part of a university and its offerings. They particularly matter to first-generation students who feel isolated.

Equally important are the initiatives A&M offers through the Regents Scholars and Century Scholars programs. Regents Scholars are first-generation students who live on campus their freshman year. They are part of a learning community, which includes advisers and mentors who lead them through weekly seminars. In the seminars and personal meetings, students deal with transitional issues. The mentors understand those issues because they, too, are first-generation students.

The Century Scholarship offers a lifeline, too. For example, Century Scholars go through a one-hour course that works with them on challenges such as managing time, living on a budget and dealing with homesickness. The aim is to build a foundation that helps students socially and academically.

One adviser told me that students in these programs often have been the top performers in their schools, but they get to college and find it is much harder than expected.

A&M is not alone in offering such programs. Author Paul Tough reported recently in TheNew York Times Magazine on initiatives the University of Texas at Austin uses to help first-generation students stay in college and graduate on time. UT found that these students often struggle with feeling as if they don’t belong and that they lack the ability to succeed academically.

For those UT-Austin students, the school offers a University Leadership Network. It, too, focuses on elements like community service, weekly seminars and internships. Even more interesting, UT has an innovative experiment to intervene with students to help them think differently about the things that might trip them up. Known as UT Mindset, it is based on research showing that positive messages during a short intervention can help students get past the feeling of not belonging or not being able to succeed.

Programs like these are how universities can help students like Jannet Barrera. Part of their success depends on pure determination, but that can only go so far. Universities have a responsibility to help their students survive and graduate, especially those whose backgrounds do not automatically lead to college.

Assimilation must begin before college

Of course, helping students from immigrant families enter the mainstream of American life must start way before college, beginning with basics, such as acquiring English as early as possible.

Sharon Vaughn, director of the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk at UT, has studied English-language learners for more than 25 years. Over that time, she has identified research-based practices that improve English literacy. (Vaughn is a colleague of mine at the Bush Institute, where she is an education fellow.)

Those practices include building vocabulary and concept knowledge. That comes from reading widely, using a range of texts. It also matters that students and teachers increase the amount of text that is read. The range of topics matters, too. So does the constant integration throughout the day of words and concepts that already have been learned.

A retired Dallas teacher made this same point when I asked her the best way to integrate immigrant students. She smiled and instantly said, “Read.” Read with them. Read to them. Constantly use words they have learned. As she explained, reading aloud helps remove the barrier to critical thinking.

That’s good advice for all students, but especially for those struggling to learn a new language. Unfortunately, new information from the U.S. Census Bureau shows the depth of this challenge. Reporting recently on the data, Education Week’s Lesli Maxwell noted, “In California, Illinois, New Mexico and Texas, the majority of immigrants reported that they speak English less than ‘very well.’”

Those states are home to some of our largest immigrant populations, including Latino students. While many indeed speak English well, the challenge for our elementary and secondary schools is to expand the number of proficient English speakers. That’s not simple. In Texas, for example, 17 percent of the student population qualifies as English learners.

Why Barrera’s story matters

To her credit, Jannet Barrera realizes that her story matters beyond her family. That’s why she speaks to students when she returns home. She wants others to know they can make it, that they can step away from their families.

Perhaps the best way to think of this challenge is by the numbers.

Nationally, Hispanics are the youngest minority group. They also are the largest. “By force of numbers alone,” the Pew Research Center concluded in a recent report, “the kinds of adults these young Latinos become will help shape the kind of society America becomes in the 21st century.”

The good news is that Latinos have made real progress in attending college. Pew reports that the number of Hispanics ages 18 to 24 enrolled in college has been growing since 2009. The figure reached a high of 2.4 million in 2012.

Another set of numbers shows the problem. College completion rates for Latinos are lagging. In 2012, for example, Hispanics accounted for just 9 percent of young adults with a bachelor’s degree.

Barrera, of course, has yet to graduate, but she is on track. One adviser told me she sees nothing that will trip her up, so determined is Barrera.

The power of her story so far is that it shows students like her can make it. Her story is so compelling that there have been times I have had to get up from my desk and walk around after talking to her. My mind becomes so flooded with emotion that I cannot concentrate on anything else. This is a young woman, after all, whose father still won’t speak to her about college.

But her mother is now one of her biggest supporters and came once to visit her daughter at A&M. She was stunned at the size, surprised there were so many buildings in one place.

Her daughter now stands in the middle of that big world. That is how far Jannet Barrera has traveled. May her journey continue — and may the journey of students like her. For their sake, for the sake of their own nephews and nieces and for the sake of us all.

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